Roger William Connah

Associate Professor

Biography

Writing has resulted in over 20 books on architecture, art and society up to the present with the most recent: Being: An Architect (with Ian Ritchie, Royal Academy, UK 2013); The School of Exile (For and Against Architectural Theory 2015); forthcoming What’s Wrong with This Picture (Writing Architecture after All These Years 2019). This continues a narrative of research, writing and teaching since the publication of Writing Architecture (Rakennustieto & MIT Press, 1989), a CICA, International Critics of Architecture, First Prize volume. Currently: Dipoli: Re-Radicalizing Architecture (2020); My Mother as Samuel Beckett (2020); The Public Understanding of Achitecture (India 2021).

Pedagogy, a constant enquiry, has more recently been expressed in The Age of the Pamphlet: (The Anti-Library Volume 1) a series of contrarian architectural essays, plays and provocations on education, de-schooling and live pedagogy (titles include Architecture Degree Zero, Aalto Ego and Life after Architecture). The Anti-Library Volume 2 consists of the series The Phoney Island of the Mind (Texts for Nothing); 1 The Information isn’t Frozen, You Are!;2 Maladies of the Architectural Soul; 3 The Closing of the Architectural Mind;4 Sunbathing with Witold Gombrowicz in Manitoba; 5 Let us Consider Ourselves Dumb. Recent inter-disciplinary teaching studies: What’s next Guangzhou – Street wear Glossary and Index of the city 2018, Guangdong University of Technology (GDUT:Design School); The Pocket: the shape of Resistance; T-shirt design interventions (GDUT); Ethics of Built Heritage (Gurgaon & Guangzhou 2018); 4 Point Theory- Cognitive Models: knowing less to know more (Sushant School of Art and Architecture, Gurgaon, India 2018). Forthcoming: Calligraphisms (exhibition of mappings) Sushant School of Art and Architecture 2019; FabFeb2019 (Sushant India).

The City: an emerging area of research exploring Urbanism including the studios: Third City Urban Laboratory 2014, Ottawa You’re So Vanier, awarded AIA Studio Education Prize 2015, Exceptional / Exceptionable Space 2016, and Counter-Urbanism (4 Immature projects by Far from Immature Students 2017. As a collaborator and consultant member of the Meganom Practice (Moscow) the following work has been edited in English; The Archeology of the Periphery (2012) and Leonid Pavlov, Collected Works (2015) Recent critical seminars on Urbanism: The Uncurious (2015) The Indifferent (2016), The Intertext (2017). Currently Research project between UTA (Arlington) and Sushant (Gurgaon, India) on Varanasi, The Sacred Ganga: Water and Human Settlement (2018-2021)